


Take A Third Option

by GretchenSinister



Series: My Top 20 Short Gen Fics [11]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, discussion of suicide, rated teen for thematic elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 11:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18603205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "After his defeat, Pitch is left to the torment of his own Nightmares, and there is no end in sight. If he escapes, they hunt him down and the tortures begin again. In an act of desperation he finds Jack and begs the Guardian to end his life. Why Jack? Because he’s too scared to do it himself.-Up to the author whether or not Jack will decided to help (out of pity or otherwise)-Plus 10 for weepy Pitch"(Mentions of suicidal thoughts)Pitch thinks his problem is being alive. Jack thinks his problem is something quite different. With luck, his idea will be enough to satisfy anyone who can sense anomalous surges of hope.





	Take A Third Option

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 5/22/2015.

“Jack!”  
  
He knows that voice, ringing cracked through the thin, clear air on the mountain. He knows that voice, but not why Pitch would seek him out in such a deserted place. To tell the truth, he doesn’t know why Pitch would seek him out at all. He isn’t afraid of him anymore, not at all. So it’s strange, very strange, that he’s calling like this.  
  
Jack decides that strange is worth paying attention to, and leaves the path of wind that would have brought him to a camp of Girl Scouts hoping for an early, early snow, and goes to find the Boogeyman.  
  
He’s a shadow from nowhere in a patch of autumn-dry grass not far from the treeline, not the shadow of a man—he isn’t standing—but a shadow of nothing, hunched over on the ground, holding his knees close to his chest. Jack sees his shoulders move, as if he’s taking a breath to call him again, and he swoops to land just over a staff-length away from him. “Why’d you call?”  
  
Pitch releases the deep breath he had taken, and slowly raises his head to look at Jack. The half-moon should make him easy to see, but somehow it’s hard for Jack to focus on him. Part of his mind keeps reading him as nothing but a shadow, nothing out of place in the night, nothing to look at. He’s not like he was when Jack first became a Guardian, the darkest shadow in the night, the deepest blackness, unnatural, horrifying, liquid and conscious. A colorless king.  
  
He’s colorless now, too, but it’s as though he’s been drained of it, rather than rejected it or blotted it out. Jack meets his eyes, hoping to find some answers there, because Pitch, strangely, hasn’t offered any yet. They glimmer brightly, in contrast to everything else, and Jack can’t hide his surprise. Tears. Tears in the Boogeyman’s eyes.  
  
“I called you here because…you were the first Guardian to pass this way,” Pitch says. “Anyone would have done.” He looks away. “You might be the worst choice, actually. But maybe that’s a good thing.”  
  
“Worst choice for what?”  
  
Pitch sighs and slowly pushes himself to his feet. He’s barely taller than Jack, now, and for some reason this makes Jack uneasy, an unease that, even more troublingly, doesn’t have its source in Pitch. Jack remembers how he loomed over him in Antarctica.   
  
“I need you to kill me, Jack.” He looks down. “You’ll probably protest now, which means I’ll have to beg. That’s not nice, Jack, making me humiliate myself for something that you already half want to do anyway.”  
  
Jack frowns. “What if I don’t protest? What if I just leave? To be honest, Pitch, if you wanted to die, you should have asked me right after you shot Sandy.”  
  
Pitch’s lip curls. “Why would I have wanted to die, then? I still had control of the nightmares.” He looks back at Jack. “You want an explanation, here it is: I’ve never been able to regain control of the nightmares. When they catch me, the torment…I made them to draw horrors from the minds of even the happiest children. What they find in me, what they amplify in my mind…they draw from millennia of existence, the millennia of existence of an evil and lonely being, who perhaps was not always…” Pitch brushes angrily at his eyes. “I grow weaker with every attack. The distance I can run from them after escaping grows shorter every time. I cannot face an eternity with all of them feeding only on me! I cannot! But there is no way out for myself, because somehow, somehow, even after all this…I am afraid to die. That fear, my own fear, gives me just enough strength that I cannot do the deed myself.” He shudders. “But you are stronger than me, now. So…please, Jack. Give me a quick death.” Pitch wraps his arms around himself and looks at the ground.  
  
“I…” Jack’s not sure what to say, so instead he paces back and forth on the dry grass, edging it with frost. “I still don’t really want to kill you, Pitch. And I don’t know if I can. Look, I also don’t want you to suffer like you have been, not now that Sandy’s back and the children are safe. In my books you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt my friends or the kids. So, yeah, I don’t want you to be tormented by your nightmares forever, but it’s hard for me to put that and killing you in the same box. Can’t there be another box? I don’t know what I’m saying, I just—look, Pitch, what happens if you die? What happens to the nightmares? I know you weren’t lying about there always being fear, when you were defeated. So what—what takes your place? And…yeah, yeah, you probably know even though I don’t like to talk about it, but people have died because of me before, but they were all human. You’re not! Can you freeze to death? How do you stop permanently? If someone had asked me about you, I would have said that you were probably like—like Sandy, and that your immortality was pretty much unbreakable!”  
  
He pauses, and sees Pitch’s shoulders trembling. “Maybe it is,” Pitch says softly, his voice hoarse. “Maybe I’ve really messed things up for myself this time.”  
  
Jack shakes his head, trying to clear it. No matter what Pitch has done, it still seems wrong, utterly wrong, that he should be reduced like this. He feels it the same way he feels his center, but why? Why should he want Pitch to be Pitch?  
  
But then again…even Sandy, who had the most legitimate grievance against Pitch, hadn’t done anything more to him than punch him and slam him into the snow. He had even made sure he had slept peacefully after being knocked out. Jack taps his staff lightly against his leg. He didn’t understand Sandy fully—none of the Guardians did—but it was clear enough that he understood some things the rest of them didn’t. And if he only destroyed the nightmares, while leaving their creator little worse for wear, Jack wasn’t going to do any different.  
  
“Yeah,” Jack says. “Yeah, you probably have.”  
  
Pitch looks up at him with an indignant glare, which makes Jack smile a little. “Luckily, you aren’t the only person in existence. Pitch, would you know when a nightmare is destroyed?”  
  
Pitch nods.  
  
“Would you know when they were  _all_  gone?”  
  
“It would be easy enough to test,” Pitch says. “But—” he frowns deeply. “Bunny will have felt that.” He shrugs. “At least he’ll kill me faster.”  
  
“No, he won’t,” Jack says. “If you were better off dead—better in terms of the whole world, I mean, we would have pursued you after Easter. We’d have all felt it like something we had to do. But we didn’t.  _However,_  I’m pretty sure no one wants the nightmares around. We thought they were gone, but it turns out they’ve just been focused on you, and that maybe they’re going to take you out of the picture in a worse way than just death. That’s something we can deal with. You must have noticed that Sandy’s got a talent for getting rid of nightmares.”  
  
“If you’re really offering to help, you shouldn’t,” Pitch says. “My nature will not change if you help me in a way that leaves me alive. If you save me, restore me from this rag I am now, I’m not going to act in a way that best pleases the Guardians.”  
  
Jack leans on his staff. “We can worry about what happens after once we make sure there will be an after.”  
  
Pitch’s eyes widen. “You’re really—you’re really doing this?” He scowls. “Well, I hope you’ve got your explanation ready for Bunny, he’ll be here in less than a minute with that.” 


End file.
